The present study aims to demonstrate how certain argumentative features of a text that exists only in a fragmentary fashion can be used to gain a fuller picture of its original content and structure. The Daoist treatise Wenzi 文子 is particularly suitable for this study, for it is available in two different but similarly distorted and fragmented versions: the received text as well as some Western Han 西漢 (206 B.C.–A.D. 6) fragments obtained at the archeological site of Dingzhou 定州 (1973). The study first deals with the numerous parallels between the Wenzi and other early Chinese manuscripts. In addition to demonstrating the major influence of Laozi 老子 and Xunzi 荀子 and adducing circumstantial evidence for the time of the text's creation, the intertextual parallels also point to the importance of specific argumentative features. Among them, “antithetical parallelism” appears to be one of the most salient. The focus of the study is the reconstruction of a text sequence using this rhetorical figure. Furthermore, it argues that despite the widespread usage of “antithetical parallelism” in early Chinese texts, including the Laozi, there is some evidence to identify the source of the Wenzi's inspiration for this particular argument as the Xunzi. In the latter, “antithesis” was one of the important constituents of the “patterned” discourse (wen) meant to reflect the theme of wen, the cultural legacy of the early Zhou Kings. Given the often neglected importance of the notion wen in the Wenzi, signifying the complete realization of the central Daoist notion, the Way (dao道 ), the study concludes with the claim that, just like the Xunzi, the Wenzi also attempted to establish a connection between the content of its philosophical teaching and its formal, textual representation.